The Play That Goes Wrong (NYC) NYC Reviews and Tickets
Show-Score Member Reviews (3,425)
See it if You love a non-stop comedy and physical humor. Great parody of traditional murder mysteries.
Don't see it if You don't enjoy parodies or you want a big traditional Broadway musical.
See it if if you love farce well done
Don't see it if if you do not like sometimes silly jokes and humor
See it if You want a night of non-stop laughs.
Don't see it if you don't appreciate physical comedy.
See it if This is the funniest play ever. Belly laughs at the split second comedic timing. A must see
Don't see it if If you dont like to laugh.
See it if You love to laugh and want to be entertained. This will take everything off your mind because you become so immersed in what you’re watching
Don't see it if You want a more serious show with deep character emotions.
See it if Hysterical. You sides will ache for a week.
Don't see it if You can't tolerate some silliness at the theater. Read more
See it if you want to bust-a-gut for 2 hours. This is an extraordinary piece of theater. Go now!
Don't see it if If you are a stick in the mud Read more
See it if you have an inner theater kid and like physical comedy
Don't see it if you’ve never seen a play before and are unfamiliar with the types of theater conventions the show makes fun of
Critic Reviews (77)
"Little more than a procession of gags, sometimes executed with tremendous dexterity, but most of them unconnected to anything resembling reality. They are gags for gags' sake...The pace is so relentless and the absence of anything but gags, gags, gags quickly wore out its welcome...If you don't find the first ten minutes amusing, settle in for a long night. If you find yourself laughing early on, you've come to the right place."
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"It's very funny, with more gags per minute than any new comedy in recent memory...There's no way not to laugh, almost continuously, at the spectacle of silliness unfolding before you...For all this, though, 'The Play That Goes Wrong' stops well short of hilarious. Even if, like me, you enjoy the nonstop antics across the two hours of playing time, you may find yourself frustrated by how shallow it all is...It's not enough to result in an evening that's satisfying, let alone coherent."
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“In this Henry Lewis-Jonathan Sayer-Henry Shields comedy where everything that can go wrong absolutely does, the result is one of the most laugh-filled works that has ever jollied a stage...The troupe of actors are not simply good; they’re gallant to the point where they should be getting hazard pay...Special mention goes to Johnson’s original sound design and to Falconer’s original music, which is everything the music to a thriller.”
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“The rickety amateur-theatrical scenery is even more rickety than before; shoehorned onto a considerably smaller stage...The cast is new...The present troupe is more than satisfactory...'The Play That Goes Wrong’ still proceeds like a well-oiled clock that doesn’t actually keep time. But it is not quite up to speed...This will come, sure; but they are not quite there, yet...Even so, the comedic fever pitch as ‘The Play That Goes Wrong’ remains rambunctiously boisterous.”
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"If you're looking for a cure from the winter blues, a way to forget your personal troubles or just enjoy laughing until you're blue in the face for two hours, there can be little argument that 'The Play that Goes Wrong' has all the right stuff."
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"With its relentless working of a handful of hoary gags, it amply proved that the law of diminishing returns applies to the mechanics of farce perhaps more than it does to any other theatrical genre...The actors and the director certainly deserve commendation for the precision of the physical comedy...Long before the red herrings had been sorted out I came to feel that it wasn’t just the play-within-the-play that was going wrong, but the whole exhausting, exhausted conceit."
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"What delighted me the most were the exuberant performances by actors with whom I'm not familiar...The main problem with this precisely directed 'The Play That Goes Wrong' is that we are able anticipate from one moment to the next how and why things are fated to go wrong...It is basically devoid of surprises. That's why I can't say whether you will be satisfied or remain ultimately suspect, as I was...You can, nevertheless, absolutely expect to laugh."
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“From its misprinted title on the Playbill program cover—which appears as if it had been erroneously offset by the printer—to its continual presentation of pratfalls and slapstick gags, ‘The Play That Goes Wrong’ is a sheer delight. It should not come as a surprise that three of the eight cast members (Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer, and Henry Shields) wrote this escapist and frivolous entertainment, which presents a trite murder mystery called ‘The Murder at Haversham Manor.’”
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